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Comment by luckman212 | Hacker News Reader

Wait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?

People who haven't heard of them generally don't have an opinion on them.

IMO we should count people who hate stuff like a user portal backed by one of these tools as haters of those tools. Although, the one that immediately pops into my head is some universally loathed HR portal that was backed by Peoplesoft.

I have anecdotally heard good things about Benioff, as a person.

But then, I've also heard good things said about Elon, as a person, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess...

Having known a couple founders turned millionaires (no one in the many millions or billions tho), they will use small as a percentage of their wealth but large in nominal terms donations to bolster their reputation in exactly the same way one might spend too much in a video game for a fancy cosmetic.

As a general rule, if ever someone is presented to you as a 2-dimensional character or cartoonish hero or villain, there is usually quite a bit more to discover. This probably goes in my list of 100 things to tell any young person about life.

Counterpoint though, they’re sometimes exactly what they’re described as.

Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos are examples of this

Except those examples are specifically and obviously not true, except maybe Larry Ellison.

Indeed - once he took the mask off, Musk turned out to be much worse than what he initially seemed.

Some of the people who have caused the most pain, suffering and death in the world were still kind to their dogs. They are often pleasant socially. Stalin, by was apparently delightful over a glass of whiskey and some cigars.

The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I am less interested in the face that they present socially.

> The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I am less interested in the face that they present socially.

This is a thought I'm having lot as I get older. I've taken to judging people on how much what they say they work for in the world aligns with the profile of who they choose to work for. Not so much for unskilled in minimum wage work, but massively so for anyone who works in tech.

It pains me to see so many engineers younger than me convinced that they're bringing around positive changes with their career whilst working for companies and people who are demonstrably against everything they claim they're working for.

I feel sorry for all the psychology majors, that went to school, to learn to help people, and are now designing dark patterns.

They are likely making a lot more than they would, otherwise, though.

It speaks to motivation generally, I think. Most people just want to be able to take care of themselves and the people closest to them; they (and this includes me most of the time) don't have the bandwidth to think beyond paying next month's rent.

Can't remember the source of this quote regarding software developers: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

We're all in the same boat.

Sure, pretty much anyone in a sales position that has had to use something else. Salesforce is bad, their competition is trash.

My sales people love it.

Same where I use to work, and upper mang. is scared to remove it due to sales people revolting. They tried years ago and a revolt happened and the cancelled they project.

This is at a fortune 500 company.

Is there a good rundown on what they see / like?

I’ve only seen salesforce from a non sales perspective and it was a horror show, but I’m curious what it looks like to sales folks who like it?

The thing is, Salesforce understands sales people, and the product is designed to make their lives easier and more effective. And you know what, they are good at it, that's why they are so big.

But they are horrible at integrating with anything else, making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer. The sales people are.

So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year, we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of our staff is actually quite positive about them because the old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.

My sales people hated it. They all looked around clueless as to why they were handed another place to keep contacts. It do didn't anything they were told it would. Broken promises, shattered dreams, and an executive shocked that CRM means "place to store phone numbers."

It's sold as the magic sales tool that does everything. And it does do everything, as long as a developer builds whatever everything is you need first. Otherwise it doesn't do anything. That's pretty heartbreaking to watch people realize on repeat.

This thread captures the hatred for salesforce well: it is aggressively sales first. It's the antithesis of modern engineering culture that looks to provide value to customers and tech first by putting them first.

Salesforce puts sales people first, and salespeople's job is often reduced to extracting value from customers and tech.

Spot on!

Salespeople usually worked with Salesforce in other companies, and some of them are even familiar with the dozens of low-code, no-code tools that you can use with Salesforce. All of them making the data model absurdly worse than what it already is.

Sales and marketing executives are usually the most hostile stakeholders an engineering department may have (tip: Sometimes Legal and Compliance are your best allies when in a fight against Marketing and Sales), they absolutely hate engineering because they are absurdly focused on the short run.

Give them Salesforce, Office 365, some connectors and some no-code tool and they poke holes the size of the Titanic in your security, but they don't care, because they want their brilliant ideas implemented now, and salesforce and excel let them do whatever they please now.

Never used it, so I don't hate it yet.

But they use the dreamy McConaughey for their ads, so they must be a good company. /s

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